Meet Woola, John Carter's Pixar Pet

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Mars' Best Friend steals the show.

By Jim Vejvoda

Watch the video below to behold Woola, the "dog" from the new sci-fi epic John Carter that everyone's suddenly raving about. How did this Martian mutt end up stealing the show? The film's director Andrew Stanton, who also helmed the Pixar classics WALL-E and Finding Nemo, explains.

"Woola is what Edgar Rice Burroughs coined as a Calot. They're these sort of pony-sized, big lizard desert toads with ten legs," Stanton recently told io9. "Everybody thinks he has six, but there's four little little ones hidden under there — and they can move incredibly fast across the desert."

Stanton's experience as a Pixar filmmaker is fully evident in the playful sequences featuring Woola. Stanton made sure to make the alien creature relatable by making him as much as possible like man's best friend.

"There was a talk, for awhile there, that we needed to make it [Woola] a little more alien-esque in how it looked, and how it sounded. But I thought that it was so fantastical that it needed some grounding, 'So we're just going to go as straight dog as we can with it,'" said Stanton.

"You find the animal, dog, man's best friend quality in Woola. So we pulled anything. We pulled anything we could to help us associate it with a puppy."